Immigrants Make A Net Contribution...So What?

If you trust government statistics, and they might even be true, immigrants make a net overall contribution to the economy. This positive contribution is cited variously as being between one and three percent.  This is good news and a vindication of unregulated, open door immigration, right? Wrong.

Whatever the overall effect of mass-immigration it is self evidentially true that by no means all, and very probably only a small minority of migrants, are making a positive economic contribution. Most of the immigrants that you encounter on a daily basis are employed in bars, shops, restaurants and hotels. A great number who do not fall into this category are employed in low skilled agricultural and factory work. Given that the estimated financial threshold that allows an individual citizen with no dependents to make a positive net contribution to the national finances is around £25,000 per annum, it's pretty clear that most of these migrants that we encounter in our daily are not making a net contribution, and many who are obviously not meeting this criteria do also have dependents. It is vanishingly unlikely that the majority of migrants we encounter in our day to day lives do not constitute the actual majority of migrants in the UK; it is also vanishingly unlikely that the majority of bar workers and baristas are earning 25K, so it is absurd to claim that anything other than a small minority of migrants are making any contribution whatsoever.

The obvious question naturally is, how come the positive balance then? Almost certainly it comes from the same category of high value migrants who were always present as part of the UK working population, city financial high fliers, CEOs, engineers, professors and health care experts and other highly paid professionals; these are people who do not need open borders, asylum laws, or EU treaty obligations to travel to, reside in and settle in countries of their choice.

What we have is the usual liberal logic of finding the right answers whilst failing to ask the right questions. The question is not whether or not the contribution of migrants is of net benefit, or results in a net deficit, it is whether or not the current immigration policy is it the best policy we can have, and is it superior or inferior to the policy it replaced. The present immigration policy is vastly inferior to the previous quality based regulated immigration policy. Having a "nose just above the rising financial tide" immigration policy is not the same as have an optimized and healthy immigration policy. Since the job of the government is to do the best for the people of the country that it serves, it is unconscionable that successive British governments have imposed possibly the most disadvantageous immigration policies imaginable an an unwilling British people. Perhaps the government should place the same restrictions on migrants that it does on invalidity benefit claimants?